1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an electrophotographic printer with a housing and with printing apparatus for printing recording carriers.
2. Description of the Related Art
Electrophotographic printers of this kind are known, for example, from the U.S. Pat. No. 2,990,278 or British Patent 2,040,226.
In these publications, a charge image is produced in a character-dependent manner on a photoconductor with the aid of an exposure device and fed to a developer station. The developed charge image is then lifted off from the photoconductor with the aid of an intermediate carrier consisting of a continuous belt and transferred to a recording carrier. In order to be able to fix the toner image on the recording carrier, the toner image is heated on the intermediate carrier with the aid of a heating device and the heated toner image is applied to the recording carrier via a roller arrangement by means of pressure and heat. After the transfer of the toner image onto the recording carrier, toner which adheres is cleaned from the intermediate carrier in a cleaning station.
In addition, European Published Application 0 154 695 disclosed a nonmechanical printer or copier for multi-color and reverse-side printing which consists of a plurality of devices arranged one behind the other which are operated simultaneously, the recording carrier which emerges from the paper outlet area of the preceding device being fed to the paper inlet area of the subsequent device. A switchable deflection device for the paper web is arranged between the devices. The individual devices can be constructed in a modular manner with intercombining fixing modules and printing unit modules, at least one fixing module following several printing unit modules.
A printer or copier of this kind requires a large amount of space and requires a high degree of constructional outlay.
Depending on the application area, electrophotographic printers are of varying design. It is mainly electrophotographic printers which operate with continuous paper and print using one or two colors are used in conjunction with centralized EDP (electronic data processing) systems. Electrophotographic printers which operate with individual sheets serve as printers for personal computers or decentralized EDP devices. In this case, they can be designed as one-side printers or as duplex printers. Duplex printers serve for printing both sides of the individual sheet.
As a function of the desired performance range of the printers, it has been customary until now to provide different devices with different equipment features. A later development of the existing devices in use was not possible.
This prevents flexible use of the printers and makes manufacture and maintenance more expensive.